ServiceNow (NOW) Trading Hours & Best Sessions

ServiceNow trades on the NYSE under ticker NOW across three distinct windows. Pre-Market runs from 10:00 to 14:30 UTC, the Regular session opens at 14:30 UTC and closes at 21:00 UTC, and After-Hours extends from 21:00 to 01:00 UTC.

The Regular session — 14:30 to 21:00 UTC — is where the overwhelming majority of daily volume concentrates. NOW averaged over 1.5 million shares traded daily through 2023, with roughly 80% of that volume occurring during regular hours. Pre-market and after-hours exist, but they come with a cost: thinner order books, wider spreads, and price gaps that can invalidate stop placements set during the prior session.

The first 90 minutes after the regular open — 14:30 to 16:00 UTC — deliver the sharpest price action on NOW. That's 10:30 AM to 12:00 PM New York time, 15:30 to 17:00 London time, and 23:30 to 01:00 Tokyo time. Institutional order flow hits the tape hard at the open, creating the momentum moves that trend-followers and breakout traders rely on.

A secondary window opens between 19:00 and 21:00 UTC (3:00–5:00 PM New York). Volume picks up again as traders close or adjust positions before the bell. This window suits mean-reversion setups — NOW frequently tests intraday support or resistance in the final hour as algorithms rebalance.

Midday hours, roughly 17:00 to 19:00 UTC, tend to be choppy. Spreads stay reasonable, but directional conviction drops. Scalpers can work this window, but swing entries made here often require wider stops to survive the noise.

Counterintuitively, pre-market spreads on NOW can run 5–10x wider than during the regular session peak — even for a large-cap stock with a market cap above $100 billion. At 11:00 UTC, you might see spreads of $0.30–$0.50 on NOW. By 14:35 UTC, that collapses to $0.01–$0.05 as market makers compete aggressively.

After-hours spreads widen again after 21:00 UTC, particularly beyond 22:00 UTC when participation thins out. Earnings releases — NOW typically reports quarterly in late April, late July, late October, and late January — cause violent after-hours moves where spreads can gap to $1.00 or more temporarily.

Pulsar Terminal displays real-time spread data directly on your MT5 chart, so you can see at a glance when NOW's spread is drifting outside the tight regular-session range before committing to a position.